From: Arcane Jill (arcanejill@ramonsky.com)
Date: Mon Dec 01 2003 - 05:17:20 EST
Of course, one really important point is that Unicode text should remain
stateless. It would be foolish indeed if, starting from an arbitrary
point in the string, one had to parse backwards and forwards to see if
there were any invisible brackets. In the extreme, one would have to
scan the entire document, and this would be /highly/ undesirable (to say
the least). In other words, whilst I do think that invisible brackets
are a very good idea, their use should be limited to disambiguating
potential ambiguities, and for creating ligated or multi-glyph "base
characters" to which modifiers could be applied. Simply put, if a
renderer starts from a random point in the string, it should either
completely ignore the problem (and ignore any unmatched
invisible-close-bracker), or parse backwards by a fixed limited number
of characters. This would effectively prevent the use of invisible
brackets as "fake markup".
Presumably, the same problem (that of remaining stateless) is created by
the music characters (/e.g./ U+1D173..1D174 MUSICAL SYMBOL BEGIN
BEAM..END BEAM). That is, if a renderer starts in the middle of the
string and encounters an END BEAM, how far back is it required to parse
in order to find the BEGIN BEAM before deciding that it's unmatched?
Just my thoughts. Despite the objection I just raised, I still like the
invisible brackets idea, and still think it's a good one.
I further think that a renderer ought to be allowed to interpret
<invisible open bracket><some musical notes><invisible close
bracket><musical symbol end beam> as completely equivalent to <musical
symbol begin beam><some musical notes><musical symbol end beam>. This
would be a start toward a consistent approach, whilst also retaining the
legacy method.
Jill
-----Original Message-----
From: Philippe Verdy [mailto:verdy_p@wanadoo.fr]
Sent: Saturday, November 29, 2003 2:21 AM
To: Peter Kirk
Cc: Unicode@Unicode.Org
Subject: RE: Complex Combining
I think it would be simple to have invisible parentheses in that case,
and be able to apply the diacritic in the group:
<invisible open bracket><diacritics><one or more characters><invisible
close bracket>.
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